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| Company of Ride the Winds. |
The book,
lyrics, and music for this second-rate samurai musical were all the work of
actor John Driver (then performing in Over
Here!), himself a black-belt karate master. As with several other
Asian-based shows of the decade, the casting of mostly non-Asians (a Black
actor and a Puerto Rican actor played leading roles) was the cause of
demonstrations by Asian-American actors, in this case a group called the
Oriental Actors of America. (In later years, the term Oriental itself assumed a
negative quality in identity discourse.) Ride the Winds would have provided such actors with only a week’s work,
as it closed very quickly.
Ride
the Winds, which
Clive Barnes called “so wispy that one fears it might blow right off the stage,”
is set in medieval Japan and deals with the youthful Musashi (Irving Lee), a
would-be master swordsman, who trains under the retired master Takuan (Ernesto
Gonzalez), now a Buddhist priest. Takuan inculcates in Musashi his philosophical
outlook on life and death. In the course of the action, Musashi falls for Lan
(Elaine Petricoff). (Lan, by the way, is a notably non-Japanese name, as the letter “l”
is not used in the transliteration of Japanese words). After a successful career
as a duelist, Musashi is prepared to chuck it all for a life with Lan when duty once
more calls for the aid of his terrible swift sword.
Song titles included "Run, Musashi, Run," "The Emperor Me," "Flower Song," "Remember That Day," "Tengu," "Ride the Winds," and "That Touch."
The critics complained that the show, though promising, was bogged down in dull philosophizing. It lacked “sufficient clarity,” according to Richard Watts, and was inadequately performed. Among those involved were Chip Zien, Tom Matsutaka, and Sab Shimono.
Honor, a rather similar enterprise attempting to musicalize a story about samurai and swordsmanship, was produced by the Prospect Theatre Company in 2007 at Off Broadway's Hudson Guild Theatre.